Would I be able to play MP3s with an 030?

[Karlos]

tbh if I was going to listen to music and use an amiga at the same time it'd just pop a tape in my stereo.

Tape? :lol:

Don't tell me. Your 030 macintosh could play 320kbps MP3 no problem whilst simultaneously solving a 1,000,000 particle n-body gravity simulation in realtime.

I used to listen to MP3 files on my A1200, with full graphic equalisation and 14-bit calibrated AHI with AmigaAMP output whilst working away all the time. Mind you, it was using a PPC to do the decoding...

[Karlos]

My 060 A4000 is very comfortable playing MP3's while doing all sorts of other stuff with no slowdown. Pity the Paula chip can't handle high bit rates or AHI.

On my 040, I found that AHI v4.3 was the pinnacle in terms of performance. Using 14-bit calibrated audio on that was never a problem. Later m68k versions of AHI were far more CPU hungry on my machine.

[Karlos]

Of course, if you have a free parallel port, you can play mp3 on pretty much any amiga with one of those dedicated decoder doobreys

[Karlos]

I never quite understood what AHI is .... is it an aditional hardware or soundcard?

It is a hardware abstraction layer for audio on the Amiga, much like Picasso96/Cybergraphics (collectively RTG) are for graphics.

The latter hook into the existing graphics.library to make sure that OS friendly apps that don't have unusual display requirements (read HAM etc) can open displays on the graphics card and render their interfaces normally.

Unfortunately, there was no similar audio.library for amigaos. OS friendly apps would allocate sound channels via audio.device and either play a sound then free up immediately or hold onto them until they are closed. Therefore, there was nothing that AHI could actually hook into, so instead it provided a completely new API. There is a device interface for high level apps that don't need fine control over the audio and a library level interface for ones that do.

AHI was, according to the author in his own docs, never intended to provide anything more than a stop gap until the OS gained proper audio hardware abstraction, but in the end, it became that standard itself.